To help close the achievement gap for students in Houston, Texas, YES Prep Public Schools wanted to enable learning with IT, but it struggled with disparate technologies. In 2008, YES Prep standardized its collaboration environments and in 2014 updated its communications with Microsoft Lync 2013 and Microsoft Office 365. Since the update, YES Prep has driven education innovation, simplified systems and streamlined processes, while supporting continued growth, controlling costs and mitigating disaster-recovery risk. All YES Prep students use the cloud-based Office 365 service for productivity, email and collaboration tools and the staff uses an on-premises deployment of Lync 2013 for voice, conferencing, screen sharing and instant messaging.